Technorati Tags

Even though activity here at NoCategories has been a little bit sluggish these days, I am anticipating greener pastures ahead. In that spirit, I’ve begun to look into these nifty things called Technorati Tags. Basically, these are links that allow content in a larger blog to be associated with keywords.

I thought that Jerome’s Keyword Plugin would be the easiest and best way to incorperate Technorati Tags, along with META keywords, into my posts. Annoyingly, that plugin almost completely defeats its own purpose by adding a list of every category in the blog to the list of keywords for any given post. So, for example, I write essays and poetry, but with this plugin installed, I’d be telling Technorati readers that my poems are essays and poems, I’d be saying that my essays are poems and essays — and that’s stupid.

Acme Technologies Zeitgeist has published a fix for the keywords part of Jerome’s Plugin that generates META keywords, and I sincerely hope that the same fix can be as easily adapted for the Technorati Tags as well.

This entry was posted by Dylan March 29th, 2005 and is tagged: Ephemera, Hypertext, keywords, technorati tags, wordpress . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments

jerome March 29th

Dylan, of course I’d be happy to receive constructive feeback about my plugin.

I’ve exchanged emails with Wayne from Acme T.Z. to produce a new version that balances my original design with his suggestions. I’ve released 1.5beta which you can try out.

The category/meta problem doesn’t affect Technorati, which only pulls tags from your Atom feed. So your poems won’t show up as essays, etc. I noticed that you’re not being indexed by Technorati — you need to make sure your profile link shows up on the main page.
Joe Murphy April 6th

Are Meta keywords still relevant? Who uses them? I thought the initial search engine craze killed their usefulness…
Dylan April 6th

Are they still relevant? No, they’re not. But I think that they could be. Wordpress ahs incorperated a way to associate keywords with each post, and this new plugin makes it easy to use those either for “tags” (which are basically the same thing as keywords, with the potential to suffer the same fate)

– I think that meta keywords can still be used for local searches, even if the major search engines have long ago abandoned them.